This Issue's TLDR...

• Why your PPC bids might be higher than you expected
• A main image optimization checklist
• How to tap Reddit for SEO and virality

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This week's Best@Amazon newsletter is a guest post from my good friend Neha Bhuchar.

If you don't know Neha, she's the founder of atom11, and Amazon PPC automation tool and this year's winner of the Amazon Beyond the Funnel Innovation Award.

After working with Amazon Ads for 6+ years, she realised that Amazon Ads cannot be run in siloes from retail/Seller Central data. With atom11, they bring together retail data with Amazon ads and to help you run more efficient, high ROI, ads. You can reach out to her at neha@atom11.co.

Now, on to her quest post!

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Your Real Bid is Higher than you Thought: The Trojan Horse into Higher, Unchecked Ad Spending

I will let you in on a spooky Halloween truth...

In 2024, your real bid could be 20X higher than your keyword bid.

To illustrate:

• In 2019, your bid was made up of 1 parameter, i.e. the bid. So, if you bid 1$ on a keyword, ex. "running shoes," you would be charged anything less than 1$ (based on Amazon's second price auction)
• In 2024, your bid is made up of 3 parameters: the bid, the placement adjustment and bidding strategy. So if you bid 1$ on a keyword "running shoes," you could be charged anywhere from 1$ to 20$ based on the above 3 parameters.

Let's take an example:

If Bid = 1$,

Placement adjustment = 900% (or (1+9)X = 10X),

Bidding adjustment strat = Up and Down (or (1+1)X = 2X),

Then:

Real Bid = (Bid * (1+ Placement adj))* (1+bidding adj. strat) = (1$ * (1+9)) * (1+1) = 20$

So while you thought you were bidding low or moderate on a keyword, your bidding strategy and placement multipliers raised the actual bid to 20X.

In this post, we will talk about (a) how real bid impacts your daily optimization process, (b) how to monitor Real Bid at scale and (c) the right way to optimise bids

How real bid impacts your daily optimization

Prepare to be told something that you have never heard before.

Back in the day, your CPCs used to be lower than your bids. Since Amazon launched Bid adjustments and bidding strategies, CPCs are consistently higher than your bids.

Bid adjustments and bidding strategies are great, as it allows you to control exposure and clicks on the highest performing placements. But it can also lead you to lose control of your bids and ACOS and things can go out of control pretty quickly.

Take this example of Keyword 1 in the following image:
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To recap what's shown here:

• Bid = $ 3.55
• Real Bid = $ 6.74
• CPC = $ 5.4
• ACOS = 90%

Now, let's assume you decrease bid by 15%:

• Bid = $ 3.1
• Real Bid = $5.89
• CPC = $5.4 (no likely change)
• ACOS = 90% (no likely change)

In summary:

The % reduction in your real bid is not enough to drive results in your ACOS. Hence bid optimization alone will not help you drive results faster. For faster results, you will need to optimise placement adjustments.

How to monitor real bid at scale

A one-off calculation of your real bid is easy. You can use the following formula:

• Real Bid = (Keyword Bid * (1+ Placement adj.) ) * (1+bidding strategy)

Bidding strategy = 1 if up & down, 0 if down only or fixed

But how do you do it for all keywords at scale?

Simple! Bulk sheets.

Watch this quick video or follow the steps below:

1. Create a "New Sheet" in bulk files. In this sheet, we will create a table of campaign - bidding strategy - bidding adj values
2. Go to Sponsored Product Campaigns. Entity Filter > Campaign > Copy all campaign names and paste in new sheet
3. Entity Filter > Bidding Adjustment > Filter Top of Search > Copy all Bidding adj. % and Bidding strat.
4. Copy both columns in a new sheet and create a table. We will use this table to calculate new bids
5. Entity Filter > Keywords. Vlookup bidding strategy and bidding adj. into new columns next to bid
6. Calculate Real Bid with formula: (Bid * (1+Placement Adj))*(1+Bidding strat). Copy formula to all keywords and targets.

The right way to optimise bids

Now that you know the real bid of your keywords, it is easy to optimise bids.

👉 Slowest way to solve it is Bid adjustment

👉 Fastest way to solve it is changing bidding strategy

👉 Best way to solve it is changing bidding strategy + placement adjustment + bid

How to change bids as per your objectives:

1. If you want to decrease ACOS, start with reducing TOS% (increments of 5%, depending on the intensity of ACOS improvement required). Reason I do not give a formula here is because it can substantially decrease your impressions.
2. If you want to increase clicks but not change real bids, then:
   • Decrease bid by 10% (or higher)
   • Change TOS to: New TOS= (Real Bid / New bid) - 1

These are simple operations you could do on the bulk sheet.

Summary

Just remember the following pointers:

1. Your real bid is much higher than your keyword bid. This is due to placement adjustments and bidding strategies.
2. Always dynamic bid down only
3. To increase clicks, reduce bids and increase TOS. Use formula: New TOS= (Real Bid / New bid) - 1
4. To reduce ACOS, reduce TOS first.

You could do the whole calculation on bulk sheets.

(Or, with atom11, you could do this in a few clicks 😉 )

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FRIENDS OF B@A atom11 ​ ​

BEST from LinkedIn

Cheeky post from Dorian Gorski here, making us all think he was going to drop a list of ChatGPT prompts (That's soooo 2023).

I love this question list, and I'll also call your attention to the comments, where my good friend Daniela added these gems:

Can we add badges?
Can we add eye candy?
Can we add accessories?
Can we add shadows?
Can we test the opposite of the competition?

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BEST from YouTube

Many brands don't use Reddit effectively or, at all.

But here's why you shouldn't sleep on it...

Over the past 6-9 months, Reddit content has been exploding in Google search results.

This means that there's some serious visibility and SEO juice to be had by engaging with Reddit communities in non-salesy ways.

Derek Jouppi, Founder of Advite, talked about how to do "social selling" well in a recent Amazon Legend podcast episode.

Some of my favorite excerpts from the episode:

• "Social selling is essentially like you're placing an ad, but it's a conversation with a customer in front of a public audience."
• "Ads do not snowball out of control, but social selling can. That's the magic of it."
• "The first step in social selling is helping, not selling. People want to attach themselves to brands that are good people."

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